foundations

Today I was at a mall, sitting at a sort of pavilion outside. I was enjoying the nice atmosphere and suddenly this pounding started. I turned to check what it was - across the street was a construction site; a huge piece of machinery was pounding a metal post into the ground. At first I turned away to ignore it, but then I did a mental double take. That metal pillar was part of a future building's foundation. It would support an apartment building tens of stories tall. People would depend on it for their safety...their very lives. They'd go to bed at night assuming the building had a firm foundation; probably the underground pillars would be the least of their life's worries. They'd take it for granted. It's for all those people that all this preliminary work is done before a single brink is laid - essential work; indispensable work.

And I stared as the metal pillar took a beating to instill it in the ground. I marveled at the strength of the contraption pounding it in - grotesque rusty red iron framwork that resembled a cross between a crane and a pulley with a heavy weight attached. I tried to understand what was driving the machine and where it derived its strength, but I could not figure it out. I watched as the mysterious, ugly machine repeated itself, the weight pounding the pillar down, foot by foot - from twenty feet above the ground to five, to four...

The thought hit me that we, as humans, don't have the strength to take that kind of pounding. That's why we can't be our own foundation. We're just not strong enough. We're fragile. We shatter under the kind of force it would take to establish us on our own in this universe. It's just not even a possibility. On our own, we're temporal.

This may be stretching the metaphor, but I saw a parallel what I saw today and Jesus' sufferings for us. He Himself underwent horrible beatings devised by humans - with grotesquely distorted minds and motives difficult to understand - to establish what He did for us. He spared Himself no separation from the lowest the earth had to offer. And in a way, that is why He is able to be our cornerstone - the firm foundation we can trust in as we go to sleep each night. He is fully established on this earth, pounded deep into the worst of the earth's dust. He and His testimony, He and His saving work grafting us into the family of God - will not be shaken. Trusting in Him as our cornerstone, we can become a very part of that building.

There is so much talk of building good foundations in all walks of life. Today helped me understand it a little better. I also understood a bit better, I think, what it meant for the Lord to lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone.

So this is what the Sovereign LORD says: "See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation; the one who trusts will never be dismayed." ~ Isaiah 28:16

"Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock." ~ Matthew 7:24

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. ~ Ephesians 2:20